MAJ Anthony George says:
I highly recommend AMT for all students, but especially for anyone who is at all hesitant about the prospect of speaking to the media for real. My only regret about doing the training is that it is only one session. The experience was both confidence-building and confidence-shaking at the same time, and having multiple opportunities to try it would be helpful.
My small group did the media engagement exercise early in the curriculum. That seemed easy, and I came out of it pretty confident. But when the opportunity to sign up for AMT came up, I enrolled because I figured the media exercise we’d done in my small group was perhaps not very realistic. I was right.
In the media engagement exercise we worked as partners, collaborating on our prepared answers and backing each other up during the interview. The interview was conducted with fellow students play-acting as interviewers. These conditions, including the fact that the exercise was conducted in our classroom, made the overall experience rather easy. That’s not a problem — it was good to have a confidence-building experience.
AMT, on the other hand, brought a whole new level of realism and, therefore, stress to the experience. The practical exercise took a few hours on one afternoon and consisted of three different interview experiences.
The first was a press conference. I was behind a podium, with a camera in my face, multiple “reporters” in chairs to my front, asking me questions about a scenario that would be difficult to handle if it was real. It was a real wake-up call about the potential dangers of media interviews to hear myself mumbling a not-very-good answer to a question, realizing that it was getting captured on film. If this were real, I’d be “going down in flames.”
The second interview was a sit-down “distance interview” where the interviewer was asking questions from a remote location, so I could only hear him. There was no human interaction — just me, looking into a camera. In this one, I found out that I had to be very careful not to make unconscious moves such as nodding my head when I didn’t want to be conveying a message of agreement.
The third interview was as a guest on a talk show. I sat across from the interview in a chair, with the camera trained on both of us. A different dynamic, with different requirements and different pitfalls. I learned at this station that brevity is key to answering effectively.
The three completely different environments, done back-to-back, with instant feedback, was priceless. Honestly, my only regret about the whole thing is that there’s only one chance to do it. This should, in my opinion, be training that people do over and over, especially if they, like myself, are far from naturals at it.
MAJ Anthony George, ILE 12-02, Staff Group 2D
